This time, honest!

So, ALL of Staffordshire Uni's second-year journalism students are doing a web-based journalism module. Most of them are doing it this semester, but us broadcasters won't start til after Christmas. At least part of it (I'm fuzzy on the details, maybe someone will tell me) is assessed on a blog, so we're dusting the cobwebs off this baby and I'm going to try and get in the habit of writing here regularly!

I'll probably stick with the general theme of ramblings, ranting, and sharing things I think are awesome but this may change after Christmas when they tell us exactly what they want. In the meantime, I hope you continue to read!

...

okay, I'll make sure there's more of a point to this.
I was in court today! As an observer only I'll be glad to report. As part of our law module this term we're learning about court reporting, so the morning was spent at Fenton Magistrates' Court hearing all about driving offences, shoplifting and assaulted policemen. It was genuinely fascinating!

We saw preliminary hearings for a man accused of burglary, and a couple on a charge of racially aggravated threatening behaviour, a slightly confused man who couldn't decide if he'd stolen a joint of gammon and two other hearings;

The first was the driving offence. Despite his solicitor's best efforts the defendant left the court with two prison officers for a five month sentence. To be fair, the man had been banned from driving three times already. Still, our law lecturer Dr Gubbins had started off pitying the guy, then - as soon as he clocked the prison officers, he started rubbing his hands in glee and saying - loudly enough for the poor bloke to hear - 'He's going down!'

Special bloke that Gubstep...

Custard, Banana, Mustard, Yellow

It seems there is a problem in and around Staffordshire University. The evidence is right there, in the car parks of its Leek Road campus.

We have an epidemic of yellow cars. Today, there were at least five yellow cars parked up, and in a 20 minute walk to and from the supermarket last night, I saw eight. one of them, was a mini.
now, you might not have noticed. As a student, and a childish one at that, myself and some of my friends have started playing the 'yellow car/ mini' game, last seen in about 2005, and gleefully hitting one another when one of these vehicles appears. the minis have been dropped mostly because there are so damn many of them.

so, the reasons for this rash of yellow? are more cars available in the colour? is it just the student population, trying very hard to be different?
Or is it more sinister, is society becoming more cynical to the point where drivers enjoy driving around their little custard-coloured Fiat and watching 14-year-olds punch each other?

either that or it's an ultimately doomed attempt to brighten up the rougher parts of a city with serious problems.

Adventures in studentland: Oxford

This weekend, I was away from home, visiting my dear friend Chloe who is at Oxford, doing Russian (we're all very proud of her). Chloe's the first person to put up with me invading their new world, and she was very gracious about it.
Oxford is a lovely place, though really quite odd - everyone there is a student or a tourist. On a Saturday in Cheltenham there are schoolkids in every direction and I think I saw four in Oxford. It's a strange one, but being with a student - mine's at New College and very proud of it - you get to see stuff the tourists don't, like the cloisters (featured in Harry Potter) at night.
As I expected, my favourite thing about the visit was getting to meet Chloe's new friends, and try to assess how they reacted to our dearest Lysha, who visited before Christmas.
I got to meet most of the gang, particularly her boyfriend - she did well - and they're a really great bunch. I wouldn't blame her if she suddenly ditched the school friends. I went in with the warning that they'd all been given the impression that I was... eccentric (apparently it was something to do with drownings) but I was welcomed, and had a damn good time. We went to see a show (the Oxford University Gilbert and Sullivan society's production of Ruddigore) which was fun, do a movie night and eat ice-cream (while bewildering one of her neighbours).
It was a wrench to come home really, but I have an invite to come back in the spring or summer and I am so taking her up on it.

The next adventure in studentland will probably be with Lysha and/or Martin after Easter.

look at the shiny!

My main and most expensive Christmas present finally arrived on New Year's day. You might not be able to tell, but I'm using it right now. While watching telly. Without my dad telling me to get off it... yup, they were finally nagged into buying me a laptop. It is extremely shiny, sparkly blue and way, way faster than my desktop. The desktop PC in my bedroom takes about 10 minutes to start up completely, and the Internet moves at the pace of a slug that's just been stoned to death.
You ask it to do something, just a google search, or to update your facebook status, it looks at you, like a rabbit caught in the headlights, then goes 'oh... uh.. yeah? I think so? ... umm... where's the button... uhh, no, I don't think I can do this yet... come back when I've had some tea'. I kid you not, it has the intelligence of an ex-boxer, who wasn't very good at it, or an addict whose brain has been dissolved over the years - think Ozzy Osbourne or Pete Doherty. That stupid.
This new one, in stark contrast, is more like.. well, like my favourite celebrity 'older man' crush. Sleek, beautifully proportioned, strong, and very, very, clever (the subject of that crush? if you have spent any time with me you probably know who he is, and I'm not writing it here)
It's lovely, and I love it. For a while, yes, the Internet access was even worse. For some reason the crappy old router refused to acknowledge it's existence most of the time. Thankfully, as a result of nagging from everyone, dad has bought and set up a new one, which works and can see the laptop.

Tomorrow is the day of my interview for Staffordshire University and I'm appropriately terrified. Obviously the hope is that I will get a place and everything will be sorted, since the Falmouth option is nowhere near as enticing - less interesting and less well recognised course, smaller campus, further from anywhere interesting... oh, and I wouldn't be able to afford the accommodation - Methinks it's not for me. So yeah, wish me luck!

Leah's Stoke-on-Trent Adventure (The Second University Open Day)

This time, the university of Staffordshire's Stoke Campus.
We were soon aware that this was a better day than Falmouth's, although whether that was because of the better organisation or simply not having my dad grumping around remains to be seen.
We had come up on the train, a relaxing hour and a half direct journey - in stark contrast to the four and a half hour drive down to Cornwall last week - so we weren't already tired when we got there.
Our first views of the city were positive. A lovely Victorian station and, outside more Victorian buildings and (of course) a statue of Josiah Wedgwood. The campus was within walking distance and we were there in five minutes. I was pleased to note as we walked toward it, that I could see hills (something I have been used to my whole life here in Cheltenham).

Registration was fast. We were given leaflets about accommodation, writing the personal statement, safety procedures (in case of fire and so on) tickets for a campus tour and an 'Open day visitor' sticker, which entitled us to free hot drinks for the whole day (they didn't run out of beans). We had half an hour before we had to be over on the other half of the campus to hear about the journalism course, so we took advantage of the free drinks and got some coffee.

We headed from the Leek road site around to College road, where the journalism talk and tour was situated in the university's film theatre. We were early, so we wandered around the campus then waited in the foyer with everybody else, peering through into the newsroom and looking at the design students' 'Design loves and hates' which were posted on the wall. The London Underground map and Moulton bicycle got the thumbs up, while foil-lidded yoghurt pots and Phillipe Starck's 'Juicy Salif' lemon juicer were less well liked.

Again, there were differences from last week. Falmouth's representative for journalism was a single lecturer who had only been there for a few months and didn't have all the information we wanted. At Stoke, a third of the faculty (eleven of them) were there to talk to us (apparently the rest were working in the field). They sold it well. Suffice to say, by the time we set off for the tour (having been split up into groups who were thinking of sport, broadcast, print or just plain journalism) I was convinced, and I wanted to do the course there.

We saw the newsroom, its computers, the news desk and the sofa, bought from Pebble Mill, and covered in Midlands news presenters' hot chocolate stains. There were televisions in there, continually showing the BBC news and Sky news, and an open gallery. Students get to have a go at every job on newsdays, from presenting to producing and everything in between (and I think I know which I'll be happiest doing).
Their radio studio has all professional equipment and, we were told, gets phone calls from all sorts of interesting people - since it's common for someone to phone an agent and ask if their client would call back.
It seems from all that was said that this blogging lark is a good plan , and that the years of extracurricular drama have provided some of the confidence, the relaxation techniques and the speech skills which will be important for the course and the profession.
We headed back to Leek Road for our campus tour, and waited with everyone else for our guides to appear at 1:30. We had a chat with someone else who had been there on the journalism tour with us, who we'd discovered to be from Gloucester, just down the road from us.
Again, a contrast with Falmouth. There, we had one student ambassador, who we couldn't hear, and who barely gave us any actual information. At Stoke, we had three Student ambassadors who all knew what they were talking about, showed enthusiasm for the place and the facilities and spoke loudly enough that they were audible, despite the large size of our tour group and the unfavourable acoustics. My favourite part was that one of them was called Leah (my name) and she was a journalism student. She discovered this when mum was asking her about accommodation and was making a comment about me: 'Leah, my Leah...'. I think she was quite pleased since she told the drama student (clearly a friend) who then said; 'She's probably nicer than you'. I'm pretty sure she was joking.

We had more hot drinks and listened to some information about student finance and.. that was the end of the day. We'd seen all we had to see, and so we headed back to the train station.

The pictures don't really fit in to the narrative, so here they are separately:

The Station: nicer than Birmingham New Street (this is not hard)

Lovely and green, rather like home
Student lets with faaabulous period features

'Ember lounge' College road's student union bar (where I will likely be spending lots of time)

The Library (and two of our student ambassadors, who did a good job)

Leah's Big Cornish Adventure

Yesterday was the day that me, my mum and my dad made our way southwest to have a good look at University College Falmouth and its journalism course. We set off about eight o-clock in the car, armed with our information pack (a map and a timetable) and a bagful of water bottles, hoping to make the journey in about four and a half hours.
My first impression of the place was in sunshine, probably a good thing as far as they're concerned for selling the place. The buildings are quite new, as the campus was set up between 1999 and 2001, and therefore very much of their time, with the interesting rendering techniques and timber cladding that are also present on the buildings at my old school which were put up in the same time. We registered and were given vouchers for a coffee machine which, in its own words, was; 'Out of Beans!'.
We set off with one of the campus tours, led by student ambassadors in big yellow hoodies. We were showed around the design studios - mostly irrelevant to me, but interesting to see that actually their workshop equipment is not a million miles away from what we had for GCSE Product Design (we were a technology college so we had all industry standard equipment). Unfortunately, our guide was practically inaudible, and might not have even been visible a lot of the time, had it not been for the big yellow hoodie. We had to cut short our tour - not getting to see either the accommodation or the media building where I would be working - so that we could go to a welcome lecture where a one of the senior management team told us that, essentially, Falmouth is different. In some ways that might be a bad thing, but it was clear that in his opinion it worked better than what he'd seen at other universities where he'd worked.
We were then shown to the journalism seminar by a far more enthusiastic guide, and heard about the course.
It looks pretty good from where I'm sitting. The tutors all have experience of working in the field and have brought their connections with them. there are a variety of guest lecturers throughout the year, from the editors of the local newspapers to people who work at the Independent and the Guardian who make their way from London to talk to the students. The course itself includes modules on the history of journalism, media law, photojournalism, television journalism and so on and so forth - all interesting and useful for what I'd like to do in the future.

So yeah. Falmouth was nice. I'm not totally convinced, but it's Staffordshire University's Open Day next Saturday, so there will be a report on that and maybe I will have made some sort of decision (or maybe it will come down to who'll have me)